Your boyfriend places the walnut on your head. You’ve been dating this extra-tepid neutral-ground grey sweatpants with your name written in the waistband of a man a while now and feel you know where this is going. You know you should stop it if you want this relationship to continue.
You don’t.
He snorts as he laughs.
Don’t bite, Beth, you tell yourself. It’s bait, Beth. It’s not even bait. It’s just a hook. A big, shiny hook in the water without even the courtesy of a worm. “Fuck you, fish,” says the fisherman, who you guess is your boyfriend? Your “Just bite the fucking hook and get into the boat.” What’s the boat? This metaphor is crap.
You bite.
“What?” you ask.
He can barely contain himself. Between high-pitched squeals and nasal bursts he manages to whisper the long, squeaky, conspicuous but not too smelly fart of a joke he actually heard from his buddy Barry.
“I nutted on you.”
He breaks down completely, his head falling between his knees as he is caught up in the false rapture of his utterly lackluster corn dog with mayonnaise seventh grade boys’ bathroom stall wall scrawling humor.
“Everything is over now,” you tell him.
“What?” he asks, visibly confused in an inexcusably expectable way.
“I’m breaking up with you. You are irredeemably, unbelievably, and irrevocably boring.”
“Huh?”
“You are an empty classroom painted off-white at a comfortable seventy-two degrees. You are the vanilla third of Neapolitan ice cream. You are a blue oxford button down tucked into jeans.”
“I-“
“You are a warm ham and cheese sandwich.”
“But-“
“You have nothing to say,” you say with finality. “You never will. Goodbye, John.”
You walk away. You don’t come back.